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Collectivism and the Intellectuals: Svend Ranulf, Émile Durkheim

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Collectivism and the Intellectuals: Svend Ranulf, Émile Durkheim Collectivism and the Intellectuals Svend Ranulf, Émile Durkheim, Fascism, and Resistance DAVID NORMAN SMITH Ideals of collective solidarity and community are often affirmed by authoritar- ians as well as by democrats. That double fact has seemed paradoxical to many thinkers, some of whom conclude, or suspect, that the pursuit of collective initiatives and solidarities is reactionary in principle. The fact that Nazi Germany sought to revive the Volksgemeinschaft (folk community) has fueled this suspicion. One con- sequence has been that thinkers whose views are regarded as collectivist have often been charged with setting the stage for fascism. Accusing fingers are often pointed at philosophers (Hegel, Schopenhauer) and sociologists (Weber, Durkheim). Lately, a subterranean current of accusations against Émile Durkheim in particular has gained renewed attention. Charges by Svend Ranulf and Marcel Déat in the prewar era have been resuscitated. But closely examined, the views of Ranulf, Déat, and their latter-day successors reveal deep confusion about democracy, solidarity, community, fascism, and resistance to fascism. Solidarity and community are prized in most democratic circles. But the dangers of communitarian excess have been widely recognized in the years since the Dreyfus Affair gave Europe a foretaste of the reaction- ary horrors to come on the eve of the 20th century. Individualism was now invidiously contrasted to ethnic unity, and democracy was suddenly an object of fierce derision. Émile Durkheim, the pioneer of French Antisemitism Studies Vol. 1, No. 2 • DOI 10.2979/antistud.1.2.04 Copyright © Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitism 305 David Norman Smith sociology and a passionate defender of the persecuted Dreyfus, was among the first to explore and challenge this anti-democratism.1 In Le suicide, which appeared in 1897 at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, Durkheim argued that society was now suspended between dangerous moral extremes—excessive egoism, on the one hand, and excessive “altruism,” on the other. The latter, which he defined as the morbidly extreme dominance of the group over the individual, entailed the loss of self, the sacrifice of individuality. Until the modern era, such over-integration had been normal. But now it had become a reaction- ary choice, reflecting a wish to tighten society’s loosening ties. This wish was found, most markedly, in the military—the very institution which, in the Dreyfus Affair, had made itself the prime locus of French chauvinism.2 In other publications of the period, Durkheim criticized antisem- itism (which he said was fueled by the wish for expiatory sacrifices) and came to the defense of individualism and moral autonomy against Brunetière and others.3 He believed that society needed solidarity to flourish; but solidarity itself could be unhealthy. As he explained in the final chapter of Suicide, and in the foreword to the second edition of De la division du travail social, society needed new, balanced forms of solidarity. His hope was that “professional life,” in the workplace and in the wider sphere of vocational interests, would enable society to steer a course between the Scylla of unbridled egoism and the Charybdis of over-integration. Just as the workplace had spurred working-class syn- dicalism, so might it provide a platform for new forms of communal life which would draw their strength from shared personal interests, rather than stifling individuality.4 In the early years of the twentieth-century, as his influence grew at the Sorbonne and elsewhere, Durkheim also became increasingly controversial. On the reactionary and monarchist right, he was an ever more prominent symbol of liberal decadence. Antisemitic writers, in particular, singled him out as a menace to virtue—a kind of Dreyfus of the academy. Durkheim, unbowed, turned in his tremendous final work, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912), to the theme of “collective effervescence.” This is the energy of group assembly, which “dynamogenically” lifts the group’s members to peaks of vision and morale they could not otherwise attain.5 So intense is the experience of 306 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (October 2017) Collectivism and the Intellectuals assembly that, in the heat of the moment, people transcend their usual sense of limited personal agency. They either scale heights of collective inspiration (á la August 4, 1789) or sink to debased collective depths (as in the vindictive Boulangiste chauvinism of 1889, which Durkheim felt presaged the Dreyfus Affair).6 In 1915, Durkheim published an incisive critique of the mentality which German nationalists had displayed en route to the Great War. This mentality, he contended, combined the worst of both worlds—soaring national egoism and the surrender of individual will to an autocratic state. Critics have sometimes accused Durkheim of indulging in patri- otic propaganda thinly disguised as scholarship, but in reality his analysis is clinically accurate—and quite mild, in light of what the world was later to learn about German chauvinism in the course and aftermath of the Second World War.7 Many elements of a potential sociology of fascism appear in these texts. Durkheim was keenly aware of the temptations of radical collec- tivism, and, in the concepts of effervescence and altruism he offered indispensable starting points for critique. Anyone who reads Robert Brasillach’s joyous apology for the Nuremberg rallies will see Durkheim’s concepts brought to life.8 So too will anyone who reads Aurel Kolnai’s underappreciated masterpiece on Nazi ideology.9 Unlike the crowd psy- chologists—Le Bon, Sighele, Bernheim, Freud—Durkheim sought the roots of politics and prejudice not in the peregrinations of “Great Men” but in society itself. This gave his sociology a foundation without which insight into authentically mass phenomena would have been debarred. Gabriel Tarde, who offered a variant of crowd psychology as an alternative to Durkheimian sociology, attempted to explain mass phe- nomena by the principle of imitation. Society, he believed, is divided between inventors and imitators, so if we seek to explain a social movement we should not look past the character of the leader. Know the shepherd, and you will know the sheep. In 1898, Tarde applied this principle to emerging mass antisemitism. The modern crowd, he argued, is moved not simply by the power of demagogic speech but above all by printed speech. The master publicist is the demiurge of the anonymous mass. Of course, Tarde says, one could argue, with “a specious appear- ance of reason,” that the ultimate impetus for public action comes from 307 David Norman Smith the public itself, and that the publicist who seeks influence must appeal to the public’s pre-existing wishes. “But who can deny,” he demands, “that every public has its inspirateur, and occasionally its creator? What Sainte-Beuve said of genius, that ‘the genius is a king who creates his people,’ is especially true of the great journalist. How often we see pub- licists create their own public!”10 With respect to the mass anti-Jewish feeling that flowered in France in the aftermath of the Paris bourse crash of 1882, Tarde underlined the role played by the pandering journalist Edouard Drumont. Of course, he agreed, “for Edouard Drumont to give life to antisemitism,” he had to take the public’s “state of mind” into account. But “until his resounding voice was raised,” there was literally no mass antisemitism. It was Drumont alone who made anti-Jewish bias conscious, strong and “contagious.” “He who expressed it created it as a collective force . .”11 This, the mass psychology of antisemitism, remains influential in many forms. Mass sentiment is blamed either on charismatic leaders, who “mesmerize” their followers, or on compelling situations, á la the Stanford Prison experiment.12 Durkheim, in striking contrast, focuses on multiple sources of causation—norms, culture, population—of which leadership is only one, and seldom, if ever, decisive in the long run. He thus points the causal arrow in the other direction, saying that the publi- cist’s success or failure depends on the pre-existing character of the pub- lic. “In Melanesia and Polynesia,” he wrote in Les formes élémentaires, “it is said that an influential man has mana, and that we can impute his influence to this mana. It is apparent, however, that his unique status comes from the significance that opinion gives him.”13 Know the followers, and you will know the leader.14 A similar con- clusion was reached by the German socialist and sociologist Theodor Geiger in 1926: “The typical leader of a crowd is not a ‘demagogue,’ he does not consciously and coldly lead the crowd in a certain direction, but is rather himself affected the most by the ecstasy of the crowd expe- rience, is himself the most unconscious person.”15 Curiously, Émile Durkheim himself has been charged recently with an appreciable degree of inadvertent responsibility for the success of fascism. The implication, it seems, is that Durkheim, like Drumont, has been a publicist for reaction, even if this was not his intent. Is there in fact any merit to this charge? Is Émile Durkheim one of the sources 308 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (October 2017) Collectivism and the Intellectuals of what Wilhelm Reich called “the mass psychology of fascism”?16 Was Durkheim an “inspirateur,” a “creator,” of hate? TWINS SEPARATED AT BIRTH? It has been common to trace the ideological ancestry of communism and fascism to eminent inspirateurs ever since the revolution of 1917 brought Lenin to power and the counter-revolutions of 1922 and 1933 did the same for Mussolini and Hitler. Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Sorel are among the most often-cited figures. In the postwar era, when academic sociology solidified and Weber and Durkheim joined Marx in the pantheon of major social theorists, they too have increasingly become magnets for liberal suspicion.
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